THE SEASON OF 1928 saw the gates of freedom inch open. Nancy, who had been ‘out’ for four years, was allowed to bring her friends to Swinbrook more freely; and Diana began the round of balls, receptions and dances that was supposed to introduce well-bred young girls into the society of their peers where, with luck, they would make the suitable marriage that would then become their life’s work. It was fortunate for Diana that she was a natural beauty as she had little otherwise to enhance her looks: her dresses were made by her mother’s lady’s maid rather than by one of the fashionable court dressmakers and her only jewellery was a small pearl ring given to her when she was four by a great-aunt saddened by the prospect of an empty jewel box in the future (‘So sad, being a third daughter – she’ll never get anything’). She also had the great advantage that she had none of the agonising social diffidence which crippled so many debutantes plunged straight from the schoolroom into adult life, making each evening’s ‘gaiety’ a torture.
For Diana, everything was a pleasure after the confinement of Swinbrook. She was not shy: she already knew a number of young men, from her boy cousins and her brother Tom’s friends to the undergraduate circle she had met through Nancy. The visits to Chartwell had accustomed her to holding her own in the company of clever people of an older generation. Though not at all vain, she was by now sufficiently accustomed to male admiration to have plenty of confidence in her appearance. ‘The poor boy told me that he was so carried away by the radiance of your beauty (my heart goes out to him) that he could not hold from imbuing his lightly intended words with some of the ardour of his love,’ wrote one admirer of another, while Randolph – though as a cousin and her junior by a year she did not take him seriously – was still pouring out his heart from Eton.
‘I hope you do not think that the heart of the lover beats cold or rather that a friend’s affection has lapsed, as you would prefer me to put it,’ he wrote after they had met on the Fourth of June:
You looked too radiant and beautiful to describe. Even the brief moment I saw you for was worth an age without a name. Please don’t think that I am being silly and least of all childish, for I really mean what I say and I think I am still within the limits that I am allowed by you . . . I am afraid that I shall never have such a glorious time as last holidays, when we were all alone together. I don’t suppose it will ever happen again. I hope you don’t object to this, though I fear my love is one-sided and unreciprocated. But it is genuine, and you must let me say part of what I feel.
Young, happy, glowing and friendly, Diana was an instant success. Surely love, the great, life-transforming, longed-for catalyst, about which she and Nancy had talked so endlessly over the past two years, could not be far off?
She was right. One May evening, at a dinner party in Carlton House Terrace given by Lady Violet Astor for her debutante daughter Margaret Mercer-Nairne, Diana was placed next to a slim, good-looking, fair young man, an inch or two taller than her own five feet ten inches. His name was Bryan Guinness, and he already knew her two older sisters slightly. He had met Pamela at a dance and Nancy – who became a lifelong friend – through mutual Oxford friends. He had also been to Asthall: Nancy had asked him to a fancy-dress dance there the previous year, while he was still an undergraduate. Across the room he had seen Diana, smiling and silent in a dream of delight, dancing with one of his friends, Brian Howard, and had carried away with him the image of this radiant sixteen-year-old beauty. Now, meeting her, he fell instantly in love.
Bryan Guinness was a golden young man, rich, good-looking, delightful and unspoilt. His parents were Colonel Walter and Lady Evelyn Guinness, a couple who could hardly have been a greater contrast to each other. Walter Guinness, the immensely rich Conservative MP for Bury St Edmunds and Minister of Agriculture, was shrewd, ambitious, political to his fingertips, urbane and clear-sighted. His wealth came from the family brewery, founded in Dublin in 1759, but his interests were science and anthropology. He spent much of his time at sea on his magnificent yacht, often sailing to the South Sea islands, the customs of which fascinated him, an interest which conveniently took him away from the sometimes confused atmosphere at home.
Lady Evelyn was the daughter of the fourteenth Earl of Buchan, an extremely short man so handsome that he was known in the family as P.A., short for Pocket Adonis. Lady Evelyn was equally small, pretty in a doll-like way, fey, imaginative, artistic and romantically obsessed by notions of a chivalric medieval world where nature combined with art in a kind of Gothic fantasy land. In pursuit of this ideal, she had persuaded her husband to buy an open stretch of cornfields at Climping between Littlehampton and Bognor, on which stood a dilapidated farmhouse and an ancient dovecote and chapel. From and around these she planned a group of buildings in medieval style, constructed from old materials, a work which took another five years to complete. While this house, Bailiffscourt, was being built, the Guinness family and their friends stayed in wooden huts nearby.
Their two enormous London houses, 10 Grosvenor Place and Heath House, Hampstead, were also decorated and run with this curious blend of the Middle Ages and the countrified. The garden of the Hampstead house was filled with cottage flowers and the maidservants wore sprigged cotton dresses instead of the usual black uniforms. Grosvenor Place, a large and ugly Victorian house, had been converted by Lady Evelyn as nearly as possible into a facsimile of a house built before the invention of chimneys. Smoke-blackened beams had been installed in the ground-floor rooms, and to foster the illusion still further the fires were encouraged to smoke. The fine Victorian plate glass had been replaced with ‘old’ leaded windows and instead of silver and china there were two-pronged forks and pewter dishes. At dinner parties there were wild flowers on the table instead of the usual roses, stephanotis or smilax, and the maids wore medieval costume.
Bryan, the eldest child of this incongruous couple, was idealistic, unworldly, sentimental and sensitive – he had inherited his mother’s love of the arts and, to some extent, her head-in-the-clouds approach to life, while his father’s toughness and political bent had passed him by. In any case, as a young man he was extremely shy and the prospect of making even the shortest speech made him physically sick. His salient characteristic was an exceptional sweetness of nature, which was remarked on throughout his life by everyone who knew him. He was lovable, affectionate, gentle and generous. It was impossible not to like him. His faults were the converse of his virtues – a kindness that could sometimes suffocate, a romantic belief in the exclusivity of love that manifested itself as possessiveness, and the sudden obstinacy of someone who usually yielded.
At Eton, where Walter Guinness had been in the Sixth Form, Captain of the Boats and President of Pop, his son led an inconspicuous life in a games-mad house. His housemaster, the great classical scholar C.H. Wells, played cricket for the Gentlemen and coached the Eton XI; the Captain of the House, Frank Pakenham, was also Captain of the Eton XI, and this enthusiasm for cricket permeated the whole house. Bryan, no games player, wisely chose to row instead, like his father before him.
Bryan’s Eton career was in any case violently interrupted when he developed polio. Returning after a cross-country run during which he had got his feet wet fording a stream – later he believed this to be the cause of his illness – he felt unwell. His elderly Dame, whose eyesight was too poor to read a thermometer and whose hearing was so bad she used an ear trumpet, thought he had a chill and sent him down the High Street to a nearby doctor who, startled at his high temperature, sent him back with instructions to go straight to bed. After a few days he was allowed up, but that Sunday found himself unable to get to his feet after kneeling during house prayers in the dining room. ‘M’Tutor when walking out with one hand held open and perpendicular in front of him as was his custom perceived my ineffectual struggles, and I remember his concern as he helped me to his feet,’ he wrote later. Next day a specialist in London diagnosed polio. His right leg was affected but gradually cured by physiotherapy and, after a spell at a tutorial establishment, he returned to Eton. The legacy of weakness, loss of weight and muscular ‘tone’ that persisted for some time put any thought of athletic distinction still further out of reach and he began to write – chiefly the poetry that became a large part of his literary output. After Eton came Christ Church, Oxford, where he read French, with German as an extra subject. He got a Second.
At first glance Bryan could have been specifically designed to suit Diana. She had inherited Sydney’s penchant for physical beauty: Bryan’s fair hair, intense blue eyes and handsome, open, friendly face were instantly appealing. He enjoyed conversation and jokes and, like her, his interests were literary, artistic and musical. In addition, he was a connoisseur of the theatre, to which he longed to introduce her.
Then there were his friends. Throughout his school and university life Bryan had been one of a band of aesthetes. Harold Acton, Michael Rosse, Henry Yorke, Robert Byron, Brian Howard and John Drury-Lowe had been Eton contemporaries, joined at Oxford by John Betjeman and John Sutro. Together they joined the Athanasian Club which, with collars reversed, ran bicycle races down Headington Hill, and Sutro’s Railway Club, which dined in the restaurant car of the train to Birmingham, where the members descended and, after wheelbarrow races on the platform, returned in another restaurant car with wine and speeches. Other members of the group were Mark Ogilvie-Grant, the young don Roy Harrod and Maurice Bowra, soon to be Dean of Wadham and their unofficial mentor. Bryan himself edited Cherwell, to which Tom Driberg and Louis MacNeice were contributors. His coterie were all clever, talented, witty and artistic; for Diana, who longed for a milieu where she could meet, entertain and be entertained by intelligent, amusing and cultured people, they added an extra, irresistible aura of desirability and glamour to someone she already found delightful.
Much of Bryan’s courtship of Diana took place in the unreal world of the ballroom, a place where, surprisingly, he was at his best. Although no athlete, he was a marvellous dancer, a talent he inherited from his mother, who had been considered the best amateur ballet dancer of her day. To watch him spinning his partner effortlessly in a waltz, his coat tails flying and a look of pure enjoyment on his handsome face, was to envy the girl in his arms – who was always, if he could manage it, Diana.
As every day passed, he fell more deeply and desperately in love with her. For any woman, to be adored by a young, charming, good-looking man is a pleasing experience; for Diana, at an age when love engenders love, Bryan’s passion was enough to convince her that she, too, must be in love.
But where Bryan’s love for Diana was the idealistic, wholehearted adoration of a young man who believed that he had met the great love of his life, her feelings were more complicated. She loved him, yes, but she did not have the same conviction that this love would last for ever – or at least as long as they both lived. His money made him a brilliant match in worldly terms, but for Diana this hardly came into the equation. Though she would never have married a really poor man and though she enjoyed much of what enormous riches can bring, neither then nor later was she mercenary. Provided any potential husband had what she and her parents called ‘enough’ – for the servants, travel and entertaining that were a recognised part of pre-war upper-class life – she would have been content. Far more important to her than Bryan’s potentially limitless bank balance was the world he moved in, the magic circle of clever, fascinating friends of which she longed to be part; and the aspect of his wealth that most appealed to her was the knowledge that she would now be able to invite these people constantly to her own home.
Above all, there was the knowledge that the only escape route from Swinbrook was through marriage – and while she believed that she loved Bryan, she also wanted to leave home. Most of the Mitford sisters found life at home so stifling as to be insupportable. ‘Growing up in the English countryside seemed an interminable process,’ wrote Jessica of the relentless round of lessons, walks, church and occasional visits from relatives. ‘Freezing winter gave way to frosty spring, which in turn merged into chilly summer – but nothing ever, ever happened.’ Only Pam, a countrywoman by nature, and Debo, who lived for hunting, were happy at Swinbrook. Unity vented her frustration in behaviour which was becoming steadily more outrageous, while Jessica was saving up to run away.
Diana felt the drawbacks of Swinbrook life even more keenly. The pleasures of books and music on which she was so dependent had been cut off by the design of the house. She loved the country for its beauty but not much else; after a few days at home she was overcome by a boredom so intense that it was almost a physical ache. At an age when three months is like three years, the thought of spending the foreseeable future surrounded by chickens, ponies and turbulent sisters seemed impossible to contemplate.
Like all girls of their class and generation, the Mitford sisters had been brought up in the expectation that they would only leave their father’s house to go to that of a husband. Diana was also well aware that neither she nor her sisters were educated or equipped to make an independent life for themselves. On the rare occasions Nancy had tried this, she had always been forced to return home after a few months, largely through sheer inability to look after herself let alone earn enough to support herself. Psychologically, too, Diana had been brought up to believe that marriage was not only the greatest joy in life but also virtually the only career open to a well-born young woman.
Yet Nancy, who at that time probably knew Diana better than anyone else in her family, had misgivings almost from the beginning about her sister’s choice. ‘The more I see of Bryan the more it surprises me that Diana should be in love with him but I think he’s quite amazingly nice,’ she wrote to Sydney. And until the die was finally cast, Diana herself had reservations.
In early July the Guinnesses gave a dance. The housekeeper, seeing that two of the young maids looked tired after all the work of preparation, sent them up to bed early. On their way upstairs the two girls, anxious to have a glimpse of the guests in all their finery, climbed over the balustrading round the servants’ floor and leaned forward, supporting themselves by their hands, to peer through the glass ceiling at the dancers sitting out in the main hall two floors below. The glass was not strong enough to bear their weight and they crashed through it. One girl was killed outright and the other, a kitchenmaid of fourteen who had partly managed to break her fall by grasping at a chain from which hung a lamp, was badly injured. Bryan, like his parents, was deeply shocked by the tragedy.
The following afternoon they went to a performance of Hiawatha at the Albert Hall. On the way their car passed Nancy and Diana just as they were climbing on to a bus. Bryan knew that the Mitford family had permanent seats at the Albert Hall; now, glancing across the auditorium, he thought he saw Diana’s gleaming golden head in the front row of the stalls. The music, the aftermath of shock, a sudden sense of the impermanence of happiness, made this the moment at which his feelings for her crystallised into the knowledge that this was the girl he wanted to marry.
What Diana felt about him he did not know. Though always friendly, charming and affectionate, she had given no overt signs of being in love. Inexperienced with women, aware that Diana, in her first season, was not only younger but presumably even more physically innocent than himself, he was inhibited from putting what seemed like a mutual attraction to the test. One evening, when they sat out together during most of a ball given by his Uncle Ernest at his house at 17 Grosvenor Place, hope rose in him like a wellspring. But as they watched the sunrise from a balcony overlooking Chapel Street, Diana’s perfect profile and cool self-possession left him in the familiar state of baffled adoration. Later, he summed up his feelings in a poem he called ‘Sunrise in Belgrave Square’:
The night stands trembling on the tips of towers
In waiting for her paramour the day;
Before his kiss her deep blue body cowers
And at his touch dissolves in disarray.
Here at my side, balanced upon a stair,
You sit politely in your body’s box;
I wonder at the wonder hidden there,
But, clumsy robber, do not know the locks . . .
Only two months after they had met he could wait no longer. That she was only just eighteen was overborne by his feelings. On one of his brief but frequent expeditions abroad with Oxford friends – this time to Holland – to look at pictures, houses and museums, he wrote:
in the course of my tossing and turning it occurred to me that you might be thinking I haven’t mentioned the future owing to indifference or fickleness. If you understand me at all, though, you must know that this isn’t so. It is only because I have been thinking so much about it, because it needs so much thought owing to your being so terribly young that I haven’t rushed straight into it. But I have thought about it now till there is nothing else that I can think out, and we’ll have to face it together and decide.
On 16 July, a few days after his return, he and Diana found themselves at a ball at Grosvenor House. It was a hot night and, as they were dancing, Bryan suggested taking a turn outside ‘for a breath of fresh air’. They strolled along the pavement until, well out of sight of the brilliantly lit doorway, Bryan stammered out his feelings of love and longing, took Diana in his arms and kissed her.
‘Do you – could you – love me enough to marry me?’ he asked.
Diana’s instinctive response, uttered before thought could intervene, was like a douche of cold water. ‘I’m very fond of you,’ she replied.
‘But do you love me?’ asked Bryan. ‘You kissed me.’
‘A kiss means nothing,’ replied Diana. ‘I do it without thinking as I’m used to kissing my family.’
To Bryan, however, a kiss meant everything. On several occasions he had held back from kissing beautiful girls because of his belief that a kiss represented a sacred, intense feeling rather than a flirtatious pleasure. Of one beautiful Italian girl, whom he had been escorting for several weeks during a visit to Germany, he confided to his diary, ‘Standing on the terrace in the evening light, it suddenly struck me from some look she gave me that she could have been expecting me to give her a lover’s kiss . . . my heart sank since I was determined to give no such demonstration of feeling until true love should some day strike me like a thunderbolt.’
Now the girl for whom he felt true love had shown that to her a kiss was not a pledge but just a kiss. Silently, Bryan took Diana back to the ball and then, sick with misery, suggested to his mother that they go home. Lady Evelyn, however, was enjoying herself, and the wretched Bryan had to spend what seemed hours going round and round the ballroom ‘in a speechless daze’.
The following morning his mood of dull misery was abruptly transformed. On the breakfast tray was a note from Diana, written as soon as she had arrived home. It said that she loved him and accepted his proposal. He wrote back at once, ‘I still don’t know how much you love me, nor really understand what you felt last night. But I am glad. I am glad that you are glad. I am glad that I love you. I am altogether glad again.’